The distinction between hallucination and reality doesn't really exist for humans either. To discover a divergence between sensor data and perception, a human needs to somehow find out the truth another way. The only way to find anything out is via these sensors (using your ears to listen to someone telling you that your eyes are deceiving you etc.).
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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I couldn't read this article. It is badly a need of a spelling and grammar check.
English is not the author's native language. So maybe give him some slack?
Didn't know spelling and grammar checks had needs
Well at least you know it's not AI generated.
That's something people really have to get into their heads: an "answer" by an LLM ist just a series of high probability tokens. It's only us humans who interpret reason and value into it. From the system's standpoint it's just numbers without any meaning whatsoever. And no amount of massaging will change that. LLMs are about as "intelligent" as a fancy database query.
And no amount of massaging will change that.
I disagree!
I use it for basic Python questions, but it gets even basic stuff wrong. The reframing can sometimes help me see new options when I get in a rut, but I'm not putting that code into production.
I find myself asking an AI things and getting an answer that makes me go “what the actual fuck, why would you do this when you SHOULD do it this other way”
Which is the best way it’s helped me.
Making me realize I know what I’m doing already.
Yup, sounds like my average experience
I think not many people are aware of that. No matter how well you build the systems with this type of AI, they don't yet know. Now, maybe they're useful, maybe not, but this awareness that everything is actually just made up, by statistics and such, is lacking from peoples minds.
This is something I've been saying for a while now, because it really needs to be understood.
LLMs do not "sometimes hallucinate." Everything they produce is a hallucination. They are machines for creating hallucinations. The goal is that the hallucination will - through some careful application of statistics - align with reality.
But there's literally no feasible way that anyone has yet found to guarantee that.
LLMs were designed to effectively impersonate human interaction. They're actually pretty good at that. They take intelligence so well that it becomes really easy to convince people that they are in fact intelligent. As a model for passing the Turing test they're brilliant, but what they've taught us is that the Turing test is a terrible model for gauging the advancement of machine intelligence. Turns out, effectively reproducing the results a stupid human can achieve isn't all that useful for the most part.